Electra Oblique

Nick Shinn

Colophon from Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, published in 1944 by Knopf. The entire text of this short book is set in the sloped roman of Electra, to the copiously-leaded specification shown here. (At the time, the “true” italic Electra was also available.) One would have thought that the sloped roman form of “italic”, used as the main style, would be more noteworthy than the modern/oldstyle categorization.

Craig Eliason

I'd guess the slope was the implicit source of its "fluidity, power, and speed."

Claudio Piccinini

Although better than a simply "slanted" roman, I still don’t like most of the sloped italics, even if optical correction is super-nice.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Nick: Indeed I would have mentioned that, although as Craig says they could have been talking specifically about the Oblique style.

I generally prefer slanted-Romans (but yes, not mechanically obliqued ones) to "true" Italics because they avoid skewing (pardon the pun) the voice of the Roman. Which does mean however that when used on their own (like here) the two are nominally on equal footing.

The Italics of Deberny's #16 and some fonts produced by Genzsch & Heyse are superb references for the slanted-Roman style (much better than the things Morison instigated). And here's an example of my Harrier, which is part of the Nour&Patria system:

Kent Lew

Nick —

The font profiles used by Knopf in their colophons tended to be reused, not written anew each time. This Electra description is quite familiar to me.

I’m sure the editor tasked with composing this colophon did not pay attention to how the setting was going to be spec’ed and simply went to the file and pulled the standard Electra profile and then appended the relevant specifics about the printer, binder, typographer, designer, et al.

To have proposed to write a new profile specifically pointing out the character of the sloped roman in this case would have been above their pay grade.

I suppose Salter could have pushed for something unique, if he’d thought it important enough . . .